Eyeglasses are a technological marvel. Chances are, many of you are reading this through glasses or contact lenses. But we didn't invent these devices overnight, and there were some pretty weird versions along the way. See for yourself.

The Horned Helmet, Innsbruck, Austria, 1511-1514

Part of a suit of armor presented by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I to Henry VIII, made by Konrad Seusenhofer.

Emperor Nero in the 1st Century A.D.

Reading stones, 9th-13th century

These were developed from the 8th century, after the development by Abbas Ibn Firnas of a proces for converting sand into glass. The reading stones were placed on top of the text to magnify the letters.

The seven-volume treatise composed by the Muslim scholar Alhazen (965-1040) contained an image from a convex lens for the first time. The Latin translation of these books was essential to the invention of glasses.

Robert Grosseteste: De iride (On the Rainbow), between 1220-1235

Grosseteste, the scholastic philosopher and Bishop of Lincoln wrote a host of scientific works including a text on astronomy, cosmogony, and De iride (On the rainbow):

This part of optics, if fully understood, shows us the way in which we can made objects at very long distance appear at very close distance, and large things, closely situated, appear very small, and small things at a certain distance we can see as large as we want, so that, it is possible for us to read the smallest letters at incredible distance, or count the sand, or grain, or grass, or anything else so minute. In what way, however, it is necessary to understand how this wonderful happens, so it will become clear to everybody.

First paintings of people with glasses by Tommaso da Modena, 1351-1352

The earliest surviving spectacles from Kloster Wienhausen, Germany

The former Cistercian Catholic nunnery, now a community of Evangelical Lutheran women, is famous as the home of the earliest surviving spectacles, which were found beneath the floorboards between the choir stalls. The finds included four black leather bow spectacles, two complete wooden rivetted spectacles with plano-convex lenses and nine other rivet spectacle fragments, from between the 15th and 17th century.

Lorgnettes, the spectacles with a handle

Chinese tortoise shell spectacles, 19th century

Monocle

Monocles were used in the early 1700s, but only became popular in the 19th century, after introduced in the 1790s as a high fashion accessory. The upper class loved it, but since World War II (when these were stereotypical accessories of the Nazi military officers) they're rarely used.

Polarized Lenses

Contact lenses

After the ideas described by Leonardo da Vinci (1508, Codex of the eye, Manual D), René Descartes (1636) and John Herschel (1845, Encyclopedia Metropolitana), a German ophthalmologist Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick was the first, who constructed the first contact lens from heavy blown glass. In 1936 William Feinbloom introduced the first plastic lenses, but the modern contact lenses (which are only on the cornea) were born in 1949.